Review: Vinson Cunningham’s debut novel takes us deep into presidential politics, divine providence and the NBA
(iStock)Vinson Cunningham is a talented writer for The New Yorker. Much of his work entails critical reviews of the arts: film, television, music and theater. Such constant application of a critical eye must have affected Cunningham’s own work in composing his first novel, Great Expectations, especially his decision to take a title from Charles Dickens. Being a reviewer himself must have made him doubly conscious as author of his own work of fiction.
The novel tells the story of David Hammond, a young staffer working for a 2008 Democratic presidential candidate. The candidate is never named, but he also never differs from the actual 2008 nominee Barack Obama in any significant way. As the campaign motors along, impelled by a sense of providence, Hammond’s own thoughts—including his own inner speech around his experience as a young Black man in the orbit of a successful presidential bid—go in a different direction from the forward, horizontal momentum of the campaign. Hammond becomes resolutely “oriented downward—down, down, down, into the core of things,” things more elemental than politics.
Within the novel, there is a brief digression about book reviews encased in a larger memory from Hammond’s high school days, all sparked by his witnessing of a vicious fight. The high school memory is of an awkward series of workshops intended to curb bullying and violence in schools. The workshop’s rather aloof facilitator tells her student-volunteers that they should not counsel or offer solace or even extend some sort of assurance of better times to a friend who has reported an experience of being bullied. No, the empathizer should paraphrase the woe—synthesize and echo in their own words elements of the account just heard. Cunningham, writing from within the swirl of Hammond’s interiority, reasons toward the following simile:
The effect [of paraphrasing the woe]—like that of certain long book reviews, which seem only to recapitulate a book’s plot and redescribe its characters but end up achieving a subtle exegesis, impossible to isolate within just one or two of its sentences—was somehow clarifying.
A sentence like that makes me self-conscious as a reviewer, in part because I found myself appreciating in Cunningham’s prose many an instance of subtle Gospel exegesis that occurred at pivotal points in the novel. Note, for example, Cunningham/Hammond’s insight into Paul’s epistles: “Those letters seemed so obviously real: only genuine agitation could make a person write like Paul. His wild voice would rock me to sleep. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part....”
In his exegesis of Jesus’ back-and-forth with a cautious Nicodemus, we see a comic exchange—as Hammond points out to himself and the reader—until Jesus declares, “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” Hammond writes of Jesus’ response: “It’s like something from a sonata—restatement by way of deepening, distortion, distention, modulation. The sentence isn’t necessarily easier to understand, but it is somehow, by way of image, more precise.”
The narrator continues—down, down, down:
Born of water, I love that. The phrase comes almost pre-wrapped, calls to mind baptism and the bath, but when I hear it I see something else: a man, alone, at the center of a limitless ocean. He’s treading desperately, howling whenever he gathers enough breath.... Nothing interrupts the hopelessness of the scene: no great fish, no planes, no bugle blasts, no buoys. The new birth is whatever comes next, a miracle or a death. Salvation, then, wouldn’t be a walk across the water but a memory of the depths.
Aside from wonderful exegesis, Hammond senses a parallel between Obama’s political rhetoric and that of John Winthrop: the effortless melding of God’s providence and American destiny. He later seems to imply a deeper parallel between Barack Obama and John Howland, a pilgrim on an earlier boat who fell overboard in a storm during the Mayflower’s crossing from England. Howland survives.
After the voyage, Howland becomes a “token of grace” and “proof of a providential God.” Likewise, Obama’s success becomes an outward sign of God’s election. He wins. Thrust into the violent reality of racism in the United States, he somehow survives, wins primaries, becomes the nominee and eventually becomes president.
Deep into the campaign summer, at an exclusive campaign event in Los Angeles, Hammond meets a famous Pentecostal preacher whom he had watched weekly on television. After his affectionate greeting of the old preacher, Hammond asks why he had shelled out money to have a few minutes with the candidate when the preacher had worked so hard throughout his life to dismiss politics as ultimately unimportant compared to the coming kingdom of God. The preacher responds that he could see “a move of God in the campaign that couldn’t be explained in purely political terms.” Hammond paraphrases his thoughts:
What everybody else saw as an effusion of national sentiment, stoked by the candidate’s rare oratory talent as well as the fact of his race, he could tell was a kind of intervention by the Lord into the affairs of a nation that needed His touch. The candidate, when president, would—he could feel it—usher in some new unimaginable dispensation, an age in which miracles would become commonplace and signs and wonders would be the easy order of the day. “Something,” he said, “is shifting, son.”
Sixteen years later, we readers know the irony evident in the preacher’s claim and the massively consequential countershift from that moment in 2008. In light of the continued virulent force of racism in the United States, such irony only further complicates notions of divine providence and its alignment with American destiny.
No matter how great and sincere our expectations—for God’s providence, for ourselves, for those who seem infused with grace—even if our expectations are justified and supremely good, great expectations do not bring into being a future that we desire. This is a tough truth.
The novel, of course, is not all dour rumination on providence. It is fun and fast. There is sex, sleek fundraising events, cold political calculations, live music, insights into relationships. There is also an extended discourse on the N.B.A. Hall of Famer Paul Pierce that unfolds at a bar in New Hampshire just before the candidate’s loss in that state’s primary. (One happy parallel between the novel’s setting in 2008 and our moment in 2024 is that the Boston Celtics are N.B.A. champions both times.) Yet, even this discourse on Paul Pierce is shaped by expectations and Hammond’s sense of self: “Pierce inspired me, I explained: he showed me a way through life as myself, showed me how limits—lifelong limits, irreversible except by something like a miracle—could point beyond themselves.”
By the end of the novel, the candidate brims with extraordinary power. Such power is effective at a distance or in proximity. In fact, the candidate’s power becomes distributive—infusing his campaign manager and other surrogates with remarkable ability to influence and impress those around them. By this point, however, Hammond realizes such power embodied in the candidate leaves him lukewarm, while the wild power of the divine—mirrored somehow in intimate experiences of human love—is actually what captivates him in his ruminations, in the down, down, down consideration of things.
The latest from america
